Most conventional strategies developed to handle situations where the performance of a system degrades need in-depth investigation procedures for retrieving information from the devices experiencing problems. This information, which will be referred to as Service Level information (or SL information for short), is collected, recorded, and updated by the various devices constituting the system and is used to quantitatively and collectively measure the performance of the system. Such strategies are, for instance, based on polling or tracing mechanisms. Their purpose is:                first, to collect the relevant of SL information within the devices having recording capabilities and potentially experiencing problems,        second, to share this SL information with a device, which will be referred to as Service Level manager device or SL manager device, and        third, to perform in the SL manager device an analysis of the problem, in order to detect the cause of the observed degradation so that the appropriate bypass means and/or repair actions be initiated.        
The bypass means or repair actions are commonly launched or executed when indicators (part of the SL information) reflecting a failure or a severe degradation of performance reach a predefined status or value. When such an event occurs, the system deliberately allocates as many resources as possible to handle the problem, even to the detriment of the service. This strategy is efficient when high priority is put on the resolution of the problem rather than on the performance of the system or on the service provided to the users.
These strategies may consume costly resources. For instance, the exchange of SL information requires communication bandwidth between the SL manager device and the monitored devices, and processing resources in both the SL manager device and the monitored devices for carrying out the protocols supporting these strategies.
As the reliability of hardware devices and the quality of communication media continue to improve, the cost of the aforementioned SL strategies is increasingly perceived as being excessive.